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who said racist?

im mario 64 when you leave the plumber idle he begins to snore and talk in his sleep. among the things mentioned are "spaghetti" and "mama mia"

There's three points I'd like to make in conclusion of this thread (which I've enjoyed, by the way -- the Philosophy of Science is a fun topic for me). It's obviously a huge topic, so I'd like to summarize what I'm trying to say:

I've enjoyed it too. I think if there's one final point that I am trying to make (over and over and over), it's that too much of philosophy of science is based on a caricature of science and the scientific method. I studied a fair amount of philosophy of science and philosophy of mind as an undergrad, and I neverfelt that the philosophers I met really understood how science works, or even what science is. Their arguments are based on the narrowest possible definition, a definition that simply does not describe what people called "scientists" do. Anyway, I think this is the primary source of our disagreements.

Different kinds of questions have different methods for appropriately answering them:
Question 1: Did Sally kiss Harry? Answered by an observation or self-reporting followed by a chain of word-of-mouth.
Question 2: Are Scrub Jays blue? Answered by an orthinologist going out and studying a number of Scrub Jays.
Question 3: Are men taller than women? Answered by statistical methods.
Question 4: Is 5 greater than 4? Answered by a rational claim without any empirical observations.
Question 5: Does ice cream cause polio? Answered incorrectly by establishing correlation, Answered correctly by establishing causation.
Question 6: Should people wear hats in church? Answered by religious debate from authority.
Question 7: Is murder wrong? Answered by a variety of ethical or religious arguments. Some people claim that "murder is wrong" is not a fact at all, but an opinion. Others claim it is a fact.
Question 8: Does adding fertilizer cause tomato plants to grow faster? Answered by every 8th grade science fair, using the traditional scientific method of hypothesis testing.
My point is that the scientific method, while indeed a powerful tool at arriving at truth, and useful in many situation, is not the only means of learning truth. Different questions have different ways that are appropriate for answering them. The scientific method is not the complete answer to epistemology.

I guess it all hinges on what you would call truth. The idea that anyone could call numbers 6 or 7 "truth" is baffling to me. Number 4 is a tautology, as are all true statements in math--the trick is in proving that they are. Answers to the rest are all reliably established only through scientific means. When it all comes down to it, I guess I do believe that the only things that can be said to be true or false are things that can be addressed scientifically, by which I mean through analysis of evidence.

Logical Positivism has gone through various incarnations over the last century, but the most strident version says that that which cannot be scientifically proven (via verification or falsifiability) is not worth considering. Other versions accept different sets of facts. "My fiancee loves me" is resistant to being put in a test tube, but we could perhaps look at evidence for it, like taking her word for it, or perhaps looking at a cake she baked for me.
The trouble of course, is that it really is a slippery slope from there to reports of people seeing ghosts (the original point of this Slashdot article). How can we accept my fiancee's word that she loves me, but not accept the fact that her friend saw a ghost when she was young? We can't start from the assumption that ghosts don't exist, since then we're just assuming our conclusions. Hence the strident version of Logical Positivism -- that which cannot be shown scientifically is not of interest.

I think this is getting at the core of (in my opinion) what your fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. You seem to think that there is some sort of sharp divide between "scientific" observations in test tubes, which somehow purport to be

Admittedly a bit offtopic: I truly cannot fathom what Microsoft was thinking when it decided it was good idea to inundate the hapless user with these obnoxious, never ending, pointless notifications. It makes using many Windows systems unbearable. I hate it. I hate it so much the hating alone is a severe distraction, merely compounding the actual distraction of the prompts. And the alerts are so pointless!! No one would care about 99.44% of the froth that ceaselessly bubbles up. It's like the undead carcass of Clippy floating back up from the inky depths to haunt me.

For example: I pull the laptop out of my bag and set it on the desk. I open it up. Then I dismiss several non-informative bubbles about everything from updates, to random nearby wireless networks, to security settings, and finally get to work. Then I decide I'd like to use a USB mouse. So I pull out a bog standard USB mouse, and I hesitate -- I hesitate because I know what's going to happen next, and Windows has not put me in any mood for it. I grit my teeth and plug in the mouse. It immediately starts working and I use it to open a program. Then the computer goes and throws up an urgent alert that it has "found new hardware!" Great. Maybe that was because I just plugged in a mouse? I try to work some more, but only second or two later another alert pops up: "USB device bog-standard-mouse is connected!" OMFG! Could that be because I just plugged in a fucking mouse!??? How would I have know if you hadn't told me!?? So I plug in a network cable and connect to a shared volume. Then "Network cable connected!" Holy shit Clippy, could that be in any way related to me having plugged in network cable? Can I claw my own eyeballs out so I won't have to see this shit again?

Score 1 for OS X: I would not feel compelled to chew my own leg off to escape if I were left having to use it for an hour.

Microsoft needs to hire someone who is cranky and pinched for time to assess the "will this feature make the user want to gnaw his/her own leg off to escape" test. This would be the baseline threshold that all operating system features be required to pass before features are allowed in to a shipping product. Any violators of the policy would be required to go about in public for an entire year dressed as a ragged caricature of Clippy, and work in an office in to which a rotten egg would thrown three times a day by an angry customer.

No, you're HS isn't the exception. The other description is a caricature along the lines of Revenge of the Nerds.

Only 19th+ century fundamentalists are unimaginative enough to read Genesis as a set of supernatural claims. (Maybe in another thousand years groups will consider Romeo and Juliet a parable warning parents to let their kids date who they want to.) Creationists take the differences between science and religion and push them under the rug; I claim you are caricaturizing them. Science is only retrospectively based on evidence and consensus. Scientific discovery requires as much faith as any religion. And religion does not ignore evidence. The progression from sacrificing first born children at the altar of Baal to secular government and nonviolent resistence has not been a random walk.

As for cognitive dissonance: I consider myself a "moderately" religious person. I do not blindly believe in Genesis. However, when I see how violence propogates itself through generations in the middle east and elsewhere, I cannot believe that idea of original sin does not resonate with some Truth. Certainly Adam and Eve were not real, but a quantum mechanical wavefunction may not be real either.

My life is filled with actions and belief not based on evidence or logic though. For example, I could probably fill pages with the strange rituals I use to beg microsoft software products to not crash. No, I think cognitive dissonance is believing that throughout history all human behavior has been dominated by irrational beliefs, except for 21st century atheists.

Just my 2 cents.

Of course it exists. What I'm saying can very roughly be caricaturized as this:

(1) If it pays well and steadily and indefinitely, it's not crime. Inducing people to buy products they don't really need by appealing in sneaky ways to their greed, need for emotional support in a time of crisis, sexual hunger or fear of death pays well and steadily. But it's not a crime, it's a respectable career in advertising (or politics).

(2) If it's crime, it doesn't pay well and steadily and indefinitely. Beating up children to steal their lunch money is without doubt a crime, and people will punish it with or without laws against it. But for that reason it doesn't pay in the long run.

In other words, what people savagely and instinctively punish is what we should call "crime," and, pretty much by definition, it can't pay in the long run.

This doesn't stop people from claiming that there's some small (sometimes secret, sometimes not) cabal of criminal masterminds who, through a lack of conscience, are able to laugh at us with impunity while they scoop in the wealth. But that's just a variant of the usual timeless paranoid myth of a secret society with some secret trick -- here, criminality, but in other myths a superior technology, knowledge of ancient secrets, belonging to a secret club, et cetera. The fact that this meme is so persistent throughout history would tell a Martian anthropologist many interesting facts about how the human mind operates.

No, you're confused. We're not crying. It's actually that we're euphoric from doing long, long lines of the ample smugness which results from Windows living up to the absurd caricature we have been criticized for representing it as.

Don't get mad. Most of us will pay for this in lost in the time we spend supporting (enabling?) our coworkers, friends, and relatives who use it and go through these problems. In the end, the joke's on us, really, because however any of us feels about it, it's a fact of life, and we're stuck with it, even if we, ourselves, do not run it at home.

In the end, we will all die from autoerotic consumerfixiation, surrounded by Comcast-supplied cablemodems, Microsoft-supplied operating systems, patents on things like "looking at a computer with the intent of using it" hanging out of our rears, covered in globs of our own sticky checking account statements. Frozen, forever, with smiles on our face and vacant eyes, in the carbonite-like freeze caused by piles of huge plastic objects we've acquired for no reason at all, which have blocked out the sun, and, in so doing, extincted our species.

REO Speedwagon will be playing on repeat on some Clear Channel "Greatest Hits of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and Today!" station on repeat through eternity, a ghostly reminder of our own chosen mediocrity. A passing alien freighter will land (if it can find room amid the vast mountain ranges of used up Wiis, iPhones, and iPods), and attempt to discover how all this happened. They will jack in to the dead, abandoned internet, itself still barely usable 500 years hence, as Windows zombies continue to send out billions of e-mails a day for all of eternity. For a moment they will feel as if they have discovered the holy grail - finally, a planet that has mastered penis enlargement! - only to fall into disappointment and despair as the truth becomes evident.

The last thing the planet will hear is the screams of aliens as their life support and navigation systems die as a result of a torrent of Comcast-supplied RST packets; their own superior, rational civilization's computer scientists never having prepared for or conceived of such a thing.

Earth will be a Death Planet. The souls of the dead will prowl the ruins like wraiths. There will be no light to walk toward.

Nah, I'm fuckin' with you.

You re-stated my assertion that Jefferson ultimately supported Patents, as if it was a rebuttal.

Anyway, are you SURE you agree with Adam Smith?

"Adam Smith has sometimes been caricatured as someone who saw no role for government in economic life. In fact, he believed that government had an important role to play. Like most modern believers in free markets, Smith believed that the government should enforce contracts and grant patents and copyrights to encourage inventions and new ideas." [cite]

The quotes that people are using to claim that Smith was in fact anti-patent are misleading. Adam Smith believed that patents were necessary to encourage innovation.

It should be clear that we, the citizens of America (and the world for that matter), are being played off each other.

We're being played. Used by the wealthy and powerful, tricked into fighting over false grievances while the elites literally get away with murder.

Take a glance at TV any time, and you'll see ludicrous BS like "Hannity" and "Colmes." I put the names in quotes because they aren't real people; they are characters. Each is a bumbling caricature of what the opposite political party is supposed to look like. Republicans are supposed to hate the Colmes character, and Democrats are supposed to hate the Hannity character. In reality, neither character says anything reasonable nor worthwhile -- they are purely scripted to trigger the hate-phrases of their respective goading target.

This is just a single example, but when you start to look around you, you notice that almost everything in high-level politics works this way. There are a few exceptions among politicians, but they rarely get elected because they don't play along. Without accepting bribes from wealthy donors, a politician can't afford the ad spots needed to gain popular recognition. Likewise, there are a few exceptions in mainstream media, but they don't last long if they disrupt the flow of advertising money or if they offend their wealthy owners.

Why are we being played?

When we think that our enemies are our neighbors, we will not stand up to the megacorporations fleecing us, and their sycophants in Congress who pass laws to help them steal our money (in return for a small portion of it themselves). We'll quibble among ourselves while they get away with whatever they like. No, the wealthy and powerful aren't concertedly working together against us -- but they're much closer to each other than they are to the teeming masses far below them. They all benefit when we are their slave labor.

We end up supporting the court jester who appears to most closely support our views. In truth, the jesters are all just playing their parts, and they'll all get paid well at the end of the night. We, the paying audience, don't seem to realize it's just a show.

The caricature in your head has nothing to do with the US public. Most people will hardly notice. Lots of other people won't care. Most of the rest will strongly frame it within their political views, with liberal-leaning folks thinking it is great, and conservative-leaning folks wondering how the Nobel committee could get more useless. So maybe a few on-the-fence voters would change their mind due to the award, but, in my opinion, not enough to matter in a presidential election.

Besides, at this point, he would have a very difficult time defeating Hillary in the Democratic primary.

You should also feel lucky that your government's laws allows state officials to at any time require any webserver to be taken off air, even if it does not contain anything illegal.

If you are disputing that this is allowable under Swedish law, tell me when the minister responsible for pulling the plug on the Muhammed caricatures webserver is punished for breaking it.

the mere fact that they dont unterstand anything about what they are talking about makes it pseudoscience/voodoo.

But hey, don't let history and objectivity get in the way of flinging insults at believers of various faiths.

Can beliefs be hurt or offended? If not, what do you mean by "insulting someone else's beliefs"? If you mean "ridicule", then you should say so, but I guess your intent was to equate making fun of a religions doctrine to insulting someone. I think grandparent's caricature was bang-on, and I regret that there are people who need to attack others in bad faith for daring to treat their beliefs with impiety. I wonder if the reaction would still be the same if the one's being poked fun at would be the New Agers, Scientologists, Mormons or any other of the religions usually perceived as stupider than Christianity.

Actually, this will happen.

One need to be careful of dismissing sovereignty with even the slightest prejudice. Sovereighty is the reason people can write things critical of other regimes and be protected from those regimes. If not, thugs from overseas could just waltz into the lands of such authors and dispatch the same. For every author critical of some policy somewhere there is at least one thug looking to silence the same.

Once the world police had accomplished that mission, there will be a need for a new enemy. Human behavior can be changed but not human nature. Who will that new enemy be? More likely than not it will be Christians and Jews. When their sacred things are caricatured, there are no bloody protests or war cries in the streets. These are the people that gave mankind a wound on the body called circumcision and a wound on the the soul called conscience. Conscience is a tax on any economy and such is counterproductive in a prospering global society. Only when these are eliminated shall there be world peace. [wink-wink]

Xenophobia is the what the politically correct call the natural instinct of self-preservation.

Yeah, facts and reason, and also logic! For example, logically why should we care about those people when they're way over in some other country and don't even speak American? And what's reasonable about withholding funding from institutions who rely on funding to do unethical things? If people just looked at facts more, they'd see that all the facts say I should buy whatever I want from China, supplying their government with tax money to build up their oppressive military and propaganda efforts! Factually! Furthermore, people who take personal responsibility to do their part to end fascism and repression are air-headed hippies, and probably smoke the dope!


See? I can sarcastically mis-characterize and exaggerate your argument too. And no, it doesn't add anything to the discussion because we're just inventing caricatured positions to argue against. It may be easier and more fun to diss imaginary "nutjobs", but it doesn't accomplish anything but turning what could be reasonable, constructive discourse into an episode of the Jerry Springer show.

I much prefer that geek culture not become popularized,

It just goes to show that you anti-environmental types are happy to believe whatever absurd caricature allows you to feel justified in keeping your Hummers.

Show me one frakking environmental group that has come out in opposition to solar or wind energy. C'mon, just one.

You are distorting what he wrote. He is arguing that the US Government is bound by the Constitution to not violate Habeas Corpus rights of anyone it may interact with (and I would probably add the caveat under its territorial jurisdiction). So if the US is occupying Iraq, then it is feasible to argue that it would be illegal for the US to deny access to the Great Writ to occupied Iraqis insofar as they would have cause to apply for one from a US court. Likewise, a British national living and working on US soil would, due to being under the jurisdiction of the US laws, also have the right to petition for relief. If the US Congress or any other organ of the US Government denied access to the Writ, they would be acting ultra vires, and illegally.

What he is *not* saying is that as a result the US is required to guarantee that all people everywhere have recourse to the Writ of Habeas Corpus; that would be silly. It is not that the US Constitution requires that the US guarantee that an Iranian citizen is able to petition the Iranian government for the writ. It is only that if that same Iranian found him/herself in the position of interacting with the US government, the US may not deny him/her the right to petition for the Writ.

Now, how the Constitution is written and how it has come to be interpreted by authorities have never exactly been similar, but that's a whole other argument. As it stands in the text, his position is defensible, and you are distorting it into a caricature.